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Planning an extended journey

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GETTING STARTED

These travel advisers and outfitters specialize in around-the-world family trips.

Blue Charm Expeditions
The adventure company that got the Burton Carpenter family's trip off the ground. Blue Charm can take you into the wilds—from fly-fishing in Argentina to drift diving in the Red Sea.
25 N. WALNUT ST., WEST CHESTER, PA.; 800/644-2244; www.bluecharmexpeditions.com

Geographic Expeditions
In addition to offering a full catalogue of planned group outings, Geographic Expeditions arranges custom itineraries for ambitious trips and can hook you up with inspiring guides.
1008 GENERAL KENNEDY AVE., SAN FRANCISCO; 800/777-8183; www.geoex.com

Journeys International
This company's founders kept their own kids out of the 4th and 10th grades to travel through Asia and the South Pacific. Their firm will help you create your own adventure.
107 APRIL DR., STE. 3, ANN ARBOR, MICH.; 800/255-8735; www.journeys-intl.com

RECOMMENDED READING...

Get the inside scoop from three more families who took long trips.

One Year Off: Leaving It All Behind for a Round-the-World Journey with Our Children by David Elliot Cohen (Simon & Schuster).When he turned 40, Cohen (cocreator of the photography book series A Day in the Life) and his wife sold their house, reduced their possessions to one suitcase and a backpack each, and set off to roam the world with their three children. In between engaging descriptions of hiking in the Costa Rican cloud forest, maneuvering a houseboat down the canals of Burgundy, and narrowly escaping a charging hippo—"his powerful jaws flung open like a car trunk"—at a Botswana game park, Cohen is refreshingly frank about their failures at homeschooling and the stresses 24/7 companionship places on a marriage: "A trip like this accentuates problems rather than solves them."

Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth by Daniel Glick (Public Affairs). After his brother died and his wife left him and their two children for a woman, Glick was desperately in need of a change of subject. The former Newsweek reporter conjured up a "before they're gone" trip to show his children some of the ecological wonders of the world—the Great Barrier Reef off Australia, the orangutans of Borneo, Javan rhinos in Vietnam. Over five months, Glick and his children learned to rely on each other and re-form themselves into a three-unit family, illustrating a simple truth, which also happens to be "the fundamental principle of conservation biology: that every organism in an ecological system is interconnected."

12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe by Mark Jacobson (Atlantic Monthly Press). Determined to implant "a better class of memories than total recall of Buffy episodes," Jacobson and his wife took their three children on a low-budget, summer-long odyssey to a few of the most exotic places on earth. Confronting funeral pyres on the Ganges and deep-fried tarantulas in Cambodia, these jaded New York kids suddenly found themselves "embarrassed by the shock of their own provinciality," as their father notes, not without a little I-told-you-so satisfaction. The eldest child, 16-year-old Rae, contributes her own blunt "backtalks" to the wry text.

...AND LISTENING

Here's an ideal on-the-road audiobook: Around the World in 80 Days (Listening Library).Jules Verne's classic elephant-by-steamer-by-sled escapade is performed by Jim Dale, best known for his extraordinary recorded readings of the Harry Potter books.

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